Secret Sister: From Nazi-occupied Jersey to wartime London, one woman’s search for the truth. Cherry Durbin

trace your family. They had interviewed an amateur genealogist called John Stroud about methods he used to find missing relatives and draw up family trees. He used local history libraries, newspaper archives, church records and the official registers of births, marriages and deaths, and had achieved some notable successes in reuniting family members who hadn’t seen each other for years.

      I tore the page out of the paper and slipped it in my pocket because I was rushing out to the horses and didn’t want to risk Eric throwing the paper away before I got back. Later on, I reread the article. Mr Stroud sounded very approachable and I decided to write to him, care of the paper, to see if he could find out anything about my birth family. Still, I just wanted information. In particular, I wondered if Daisy and Henri Noël had remarried and I might have half-brothers or sisters somewhere.

      A week later I got a reply from Mr Stroud saying he would be happy to help me trace my birth parents. He asked for copies of my adoption documents and my birth certificate. I’d asked what fee he would charge for helping me, but he replied that he wouldn’t charge me anything. Genealogy was a hobby for him. I made the copies and sent them to him in the very next post, feeling both excited and nervous at the same time. I hadn’t thought through what I would do if he did find them, but I desperately hoped we would be able to form some kind of relationship. Pop’s health was declining and there was no need for him to find out what I was doing, so it couldn’t hurt him.

      John Stroud did his best, He wrote that his daughter had personally gone in to the Register Office in London to do a search for them but hadn’t been able to find anything. Since we didn’t know their dates of birth, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. None of his other searches had turned up any leads and he wrote: ‘The trouble is that all the information you’ve given me about Daisy and Henri is almost forty years out of date. After that length of time it’s not surprising if you can’t find any neighbours who remember them, and I wouldn’t expect anyone to have forwarding addresses for them. We’ll keep trying though, Cherry.’

      He was a lovely man who always broke bad news to me in the most sensitive ways, remaining cheerful and positive throughout. However, after several weeks of dead ends, we agreed there was nowhere else to go at the UK end.

      Meanwhile, I’d had another idea. Both Daisy and Henri had been born in Jersey, as far as I knew, so perhaps I would have more luck if I wrote to the Register Office in St Helier. I sent a request for their birth certificates, along with a cheque, and it was such a long time before I heard anything more that I had all but given up hope by the time a long, official-looking envelope plopped through the letterbox. I opened it and found a birth certificate inside. With great excitement I realised it was for my father, Henri Le Gresley Noël. According to this piece of paper, he was the son of Philippe Noël, a labourer, and Louisa Mary Ann Le Breton in the parish of Trinity in Jersey. His birthday was 4 January 1913. It was now 1982, which meant he was sixty-nine years old and there was a good chance he was still alive. I crossed my fingers that he would be.

      Now that I had my biological father’s date of birth, I was able to apply to the British Register Office again to see if they had any marriage certificates in his name. At least he had an unusual name, and the chances of getting the wrong person were slight. He and my mother had separated by the time I was born in 1943, when he was thirty years old. Surely he would have remarried in the last thirty-nine years? And surely there was a good chance he had had more children?

      It seemed to take ages before another certificate arrived, telling me that he had married a woman called Dora in 1964 and that they had lived in Cardiff. There was an address in St Mellons, a district in the northeast of the city.

      Now for the moment of truth. I had a chance to get in touch with my birth father, but what on earth would I say? Who was he, anyway? Why had he split up with my birth mother? Why hadn’t he wanted me? There were so many questions I needed answers to and the only thing for it was to write.

      I kept my letter very short and factual, just asking if he had been married to Daisy Banks from Jersey and saying that, if so, I thought I might be his daughter. I told him I had been adopted in April 1943 by a lovely couple, Dorothy and Ernest Vousden and that I was now married with two children of my own, but that I was curious to find out about his side of the family and would be very grateful if he was willing to enter into a correspondence with me. I addressed the envelope, licked the stamp and went out to the postbox. I hesitated for a minute, holding the envelope in the slot but not letting it go. And then I relaxed my fingers and heard the plop as it hit the other mail piled at the bottom. Now for the waiting.

      In fact, it didn’t take very long before I heard back. Somehow I knew from the unfamiliar handwriting on the envelope that it was a reply to my letter, and I ripped it open to find a small sheet of beige paper covered on both sides in curly writing in blue Biro.

      ‘Dear Paulette